A Century of Recording

As The Philadelphia Orchestra celebrates the 100th anniversary of being the first orchestra to record electronically, we take a look back at the ensemble’s early and unprecedented recording history.

Above photo: The Philadelphia Orchestra’s first commercial recording, Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5

By Steve Holt

Until 1877, and Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph, the only way to hear music was live: in a concert hall, a salon, perhaps a house party. Today, we take for granted that we can carry with us, in pocket or purse, a relatively tiny device capable of holding more music than we can listen to in a lifetime. It’s been quite a journey from then to now. And The Philadelphia Orchestra has been there almost every note of the way. 

That 1877 phonograph was shockingly primitive by today’s standards. The original recording medium was tin foil, which unfortunately lasted only a few playbacks before it crumbled. Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and many other scientists and inventors continued to improve on the device. But as veteran engineer Ward Marston explains, even as late as 1917, when The Philadelphia Orchestra made its first recordings (under Music Director Leopold Stokowski), conditions were less than ideal.

"It wasn’t quite a full complement of musicians, maybe 80 or so. They were crammed into a very small studio in Camden, New Jersey, a former church that had been remodeled for that purpose by the Victor Talking Machine Company. We actually don’t know a lot about how the recordings were made, because they didn’t take a lot of photographs. They didn’t want competing record companies to learn any tricks of the trade! But years later, I did talk to a number of players who had made those early recordings. They told me it was very difficult and tremendously stressful. The softer instruments had to be placed closer to the recording horn [think of the large, morning-glory speakers on early Victrolas] while the brass, being the loudest, were as far from the horn as possible. And then if there was, for example, an oboe solo, the oboist would have to get up out of his chair, walk over to the horn, and play directly into it when it was time for the solo! It was also very difficult to record bass frequencies, so the string bass parts had to be reinforced using tubas, or other deep instruments."

Unfortunately, the resulting records simply didn’t sound like a live performance, because the recording system couldn’t capture all the frequencies an orchestra produces. Another problem: It was impossible to tell if a “take” was acceptable until after it had been recorded. That left a lot of recordings on the cutting-room floor.

Despite all these difficulties, Stokowski was determined to use this new technology to bring the music of his Philadelphia Orchestra to the wider world. Those numerous first sessions in 1917 produced usable recordings of only a handful of works: Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Orfeo ed Euridice, and “Anitra’s Dance” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.

Stokowski and the Orchestra kept at it in the ensuing years, recording composers from Wagner to Schubert to Stravinsky. Sergei Rachmaninoff even recorded his Second Piano Concerto with the Philadelphians and Stokowski—only the second and third movements were initially released. 

Then, one hundred years ago, in 1925, the “Big Bang” of recorded music exploded on the scene. The Bell Telephone Laboratories had developed an electrical recording process, using microphones instead of the primitive, giant horns of earlier days. On April 29, 1925, with Stokowski on the podium, The Philadelphia Orchestra recorded Saint-Saëns Danse macabre and the “Polovtsian Dances” from Borodin’s Prince Igor. Gone was the poor frequency response, replaced by a stunning and vivid realism. 

Over the next several years, disc after disc flew out of the studio: Dvořák's "New World" Symphony; Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite; Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite; and the first complete American recordings of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, Franck’s Symphony in D major, and Stokowski’s own signature transcription for orchestra of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. 

The sound technology continued to improve. Engineers on both sides of the Atlantic experimented with microphone placement, different recording media, and other innovations to improve the sound quality for people listening to records at home. 

By 1931, Bell Labs had set up its latest recording equipment in the basement of the Academy of Music. The concert hall became a hi-tech sound lab, where Bell engineers could work on creating longer-playing records (the then-standard 78 rpm record could only hold a few minutes of music per side); develop stereo recording (to recreate the impression of hearing instruments in their respective spaces in the concert hall); and even learn how to transmit an orchestra concert over telephone lines. 

Stokowski was keeping up on all these developments, to ensure his orchestra could take full advantage of them. In April 1931, he began recording with Bell Labs’s latest: a new way of transferring sound to the grooves of an acetate disk. Later, when Stokowski heard a playback of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, recorded with the Orchestra in December 1931 using the new techniques, he called it the finest recording he had ever heard. 

From those now seemingly primitive beginnings, the list of Philadelphia Orchestra breakthroughs in electronic media has continued to grow, from performing the soundtrack to Fantasia in 1939, to being the first orchestra on nationwide television in 1948, and the first major American orchestra to give a live concert cybercast on the internet in 1997, and on to the present day.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is commemorating all these sonic breakthroughs by reaching as far into the technological past as possible. According to Andrew Mellor, the Orchestra’s audio producer and engineer, recreating the 1925 breakthrough would be prohibitively expensive, due to the elaborate machinery involved. But for a recording of Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso (part of a program conducted this past January/February by Daniele Rustioni), Mellor produced a two-microphone capture of the Orchestra using 1930s techniques, while simultaneously recording the concert using modern methods. On May 11 and 12, as part of its regular Philadelphia Orchestra broadcasts, WRTI will air both versions of the Ravel piece. Like time travelers, listeners will be able to experience the Philadelphia Sound as it was emerging into the modern era. 

Steve Holt, managing partner at re:Write, is a veteran journalist and musician.